


Rose & King

by rainbowagnes



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/F, Femslash, I will make that a tag if it kills me, Road Trips, Roommates, Southeast Asian Character(s), Tattoos, briefly mentioned road trip, cuteness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-13
Updated: 2017-09-13
Packaged: 2018-12-15 06:01:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11799903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainbowagnes/pseuds/rainbowagnes
Summary: They're twenty six when they get their first tattoos.(Or, four years in the lives of Rey and Rose. Because the Force may be responsible for a lot, but some things were just meant to be.)





	Rose & King

They're twenty six years old when they get their first tattoos. 

(Twenty two, and they're flatmates. The first flatmates either has ever had. Rey's always been alone, and Rose has always been surrounded by a gaggle of family, her sister and cousins and aunts and uncles and the random friends and strangers who drop by as well. It's an adjustment period. Rey is spectacularly bad at remembering to shut doors, Rose sometimes breaks from the alone-ness. Rey doesn't know what to do with the crying girl on the couch, so she decides the best thing to do is be there (the way she always wanted someone to be there for her.) She plops down next to her and begins to stream Top Gun on a pirate sight that features at least eight layers of fire walls before the final video. 

It's too much for Rose.

"You don't have a fucking Netflix account?" 

"Why bother?" 

"Legality." 

"Corporate legality?" 

"Fucking christ, Rey, there are times to be an anti-corporate rebel. Fucking Top Gun isn't one of them." 

They end up watching it on the cracked display on Rose's phone, which involves curling in comfortably close to each other under Rose's lucky blanket. (It IS lucky, she swears. A truly atrocious mustard design of tartan, to be sure, but very soft and scored from Macy's on the same day she was accepted, with full honors, to university.) Being under the blanket means being warm, a kind of nebulous feeling that's been gone in both the figurative and literal sense ever since she hiked it north from the balmy air and family of New Orleans to the grey of Seattle. 

"Thanks," Rose tells her after. "It's like something my sister would do." 

And those words send a twinge through Rey's heart, even though she doesn't know why. 

Twenty three, and they're drunk on the roof, the lightest fucking lightweights to ever down cheep beer and break down laughing. They laugh at the world, dance, drunkenly try to sing the lyrics of "American Pie" and "Africa" until the neighbors scream at them to shut up and they dissolve into a fit of giggles. Rey wakes up the next morning with gravel digging into her arms and the soft dark strands of Rose's hair blowing across her face Rose splayed out across her. Finn finds them, comes back up with a blanket and tea, but Rey puts a finger to her lips and gestures him away, out of the moment she wants to stretch out forever and ever. A loop, a circle, a golden morning with no end. 

Twenty four, and Rose's uncle dies. He goes silently and peacefully, surrounded by friends and family, but he still goes before his time, and he goes in a blue shot-gun house all the way across the heartlands in the Big Easy. 

They load up the Falcon with their duffel bags and enough maps and atlases to open up a shop. (THey end up mainly using Google Maps, anyway, but you can never be to careful. Rose has seen what happens to people who aren't, and she's willing to do anything or go anywhere, provide she can plan for it.) 

For once, nothing in the ancient, spectacularly shitty car breaks down. Seattle to Boise, Boise to Salt Lake City, Salt Lake City to Santa Fe and Amarillo and Dallas and Shreveport. Rose is empty, hollow. She feels there is nothing left inside to be broken. Rey marks the distance by the food at their roadside stops. Huckleberry pie, pastrami burgers, huevos rancheros, chile con queso and chicken enchiladas, crawfish and collards. 

Massive metal bowls of pho with long red dashes of Crystal Hot Sauce, when they finally reach their destination. 

The air is warm and soupy in New Orleans. Liquid. It's a city with death in its bones. Death and hope, which Rose feels in her own bones at the funeral, at the crowds who's life he changed for the better. 

The grave will sink in the marshy soil, as so many generations of Crescent City dwellers have. But he will be remembered. 

The drive back goes faster, grassy plains flying into the sky behind them. At the end of it, she kisses Rey. In the carpark that always smells a bit like diesel and has a rat problem. 

It's the most romantic place in the world. 

(Twenty five, and they're in love. 

Rey doesn't really know if she's been in love before. There's the vague, golden feeling of a childhood she can't remember enough to attribute specific details too, and then there's a love that came from her favorite foster family as a teenager, the one that adopted her and brought her into their fold. That love was a kind of golden belonging made manifest in hugs and homework help and endless cups of tea when she stayed up far to late to finish assignments. It was family, it was Christmas dinner and Scrabble. 

There's Finn, too. Best friend. Shared acquaintance. The one who got all this started to begin with. The first friend she made at college. All nighters studying with books splayed out across his otherwise fastidious apartment, color-coded highlights, always being beaten by his massive vocabulary in Scrabble, benders out on the town. Robotics projects and school events. Football games where he put her on his shoulders [Finn complained about what a useless venture that was, given that why were so very nearly the same height, so she let him cheer from her shoulders], football games they left early to marathon Deep Space Nine because that's the kind of nerds they are. 

This love is different. 

Rose, on the other hand, has felt love her whole life.

There's Finn, as well. Best friend. Shared acquaintance. The one who set them up as roommates to begin with. Childhood friends, memories of shared parades and twitching in church, food and family and steaming hot summers. Snowballs, cafe au lait, King Cake and being shepherded by their mothers to the zoo. 

This love is different. ) 

The decision to get tattoos is both highly meditated and spur-of-the-moment. A parlor with flashing lights. Two wrists. Pain. Whatever lies between them, deep and infinite and forever. New, old, familiar and unbreakable. The tattoo artist is a middle aged woman named Sabine who seems disappointed in the simplicity of the designs they choose. 

A rose, blooming on the inside of Rey's almost colorless wrist. Rose, the flower, an image and not words, to contain the whole of her, the English name and the Vietnamese one her parents gave her. Mai, not a rose, specifically, but a blossom, a golden flower that merges with the rose on her wrist. Rose. Mai. The girl who stands on earth designing the things that allow others to do impossible things in the sky above. (Her sister is one of them. Her sister, the brilliant, brave test pilot. They talk every day.) 

On the inside of Rose's wrist, a crown. Rey- the king, as Rey's dad told her. Her real dad, the one who found her dumpster diving at thirteen and took her home to his dry English wife, to sunday meals of burned roast and chilequiles and her adopted grandparents who still send her money in red paper envelopes for the New Year and her uncle who first taught her to fix up cars so that they ran so smooth driving them feels like flying. 

Rose and Rey were meant to fly. 

They were meant to fly together. 

**Author's Note:**

> Leave me Roserey prompts in the comments or my ask box on Tumblr @ghostborscht! I hope you enjoyed, I definitely need to get in the habit of writing more femslash.


End file.
